Turn your old PC into a personal Google Drive.

Turn your old PC into a personal Google Drive.

Assalamu Alaikum.  Hope everyone is well.  I am here again with a new post.  So more or less we all use Google Drive to backup our photos, videos, important files.  But the problem is that Google Drive gives only 15 GB of free storage.  You have to pay to use more than that.  Many people do not want to upload their important files to Google Drive for security reasons.  In today's post I will show you how to turn your old PC into a personal Google Drive.  This will keep your files secure and you can access them from any of your devices.  In short, you can think of it as your personal home server.  Here you can upload your important files, upload images, videos etc and play directly from the server.  You can backup your phone contacts, calendar etc.  You will get more features than Google Drive.  So let's start without delay.

First you need to install Linux operating system on your old PC.  I would recommend the LTS version of Ubuntu.  But if your PC is a bit weak you can install Kubuntu or Lubuntu.  You can build this server with any linux distro but if you don't know much about linux it is better to give ubuntu or ubuntu based distro.  Now you might be asking if you can create a key server with Windows?  Of course you can do it with Windows but it is much easier to do it in Linux and besides we will have this server always running so Linux is the perfect choice for this.  I will be using Arch Linux for this post for personal reasons but the process is pretty much the same on every Linux.  So now that your Linux is installed, let's go to the next step.

 If you are an Arch Linux user like me then you open terminal and type,

 sudo pacman -S docker docker-compose

 Then press enter.  Docker and Docker Compose will be installed on your PC.

But Ubuntu/Debian users follow below steps.

 Open your terminal and type the following command.

 curl -fsSL https://get.docker.com -o docker.sh

 Then press enter.  Then type again,

 sudo sh docker.sh

 and press enter.  Docker will then be installed on your computer.  Now type docker-compose to install,

 sudo apt install docker-compose

 Then press enter.

 After installing Docker and Docker Compose, now we need to give permission to the user to use Docker.  (You can skip this step if you are root user.)

 For this, type

 sudo usermod -aG docker username

 Here, replace username with your Linux system username.

Then you need to download a file.  Download the file .docker-compose.yaml by clicking below

 Place the file in your home directory.  Then open terminal and type,

 sudo docker-compose up -d

 Well, most of your work is done.  Now you have to wait for a while.  It may take 5-10 minutes depending on your internet speed.

Once the configuration is finished, open your browser.  Then type in the address bar,

 http://localhost:8080

 Then press enter.  Then you will see the interface like below.

Now in place of Username you give a username of your choice and set the password.  Replace the Data Folder with what's there.  Under Configure the database select PostgreSQL.  Then type exactly what is given as in the screenshot.  (You can change these from the configuration file if you want.) Be sure to type the database user and database password correctly, and type the database name and database host correctly.  Then click on Install button.

 Now you will see the interface like below.

Click on Install recommended apps.  Then wait for a while.  Once completed you will see the dashboard like below.

Your personal Google Drive is now ready.  Now you can upload files, images, videos here if you want.  There are several apps here but if you want you can install more apps as per your need.  But follow below steps to access this server from all devices.

 Open your terminal and type,

 sudo nano app/config/config.php

If you don't know your local IP address, type

 ifconfig

 or,

 ip addr

 Then you will get your IP address.  Then enter the IP address as shown in the above screenshot.  Be sure to put :8080 after your IP address.

 Well now you can access your server from any device.  For example I will access from my mobile.  For that I downloaded NextCloud app from playstore.

But you can access this server only when you are on your WiFi.  If you want to access it from any part of the world, then I will discuss it in the next post.  So far today.  stay well  stay healthy